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Angelus Novus is a beautiful painting in every (authentic) sense of the word, and only philistines think otherwise
Scott just published Contra Everyone On Taste:
This post is a followup to the earlier Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste. It seems that the track of the discussion went roughly as follows: Scott was reflecting on how the tastes of art connoisseurs (either self-proclaimed or credentialed) tend to a) differ sharply from the tastes of the much larger mass of non-experts, and b) show a preference for art that the majority of people consider to be ugly or incomprehensible. He essentially argued that the opinions of the "experts" are grounded in bullshit status games, political power struggles, arbitrary fashion trends, etc, while normal people are free to enter into a more natural relationship with artworks that are actually beautiful and pleasant:
When people responded to the post and argued that people with more "elitist" tastes actually are responding to features of artworks that are both objectively real and deserving of attention, like the artwork's historical and social context, philosophical content, etc, it eventually prompted Scott to respond with his latest post.
He argues that many of the proposed features of artworks that are allegedly worth appreciating, like the art's historical context or its position in an ongoing artistic dialogue, are essentially extraneous, and will only serve to hinder one's natural and immediate appreciation of the art's "sensory pleasures" (or lack thereof). He really seems to be pushing this idea of a pure and natural response above all else, abstracted away from any possible considerations of context. I think this dialectical maneuver of his is ultimately grounded in his incredulity that anyone could actually, really enjoy the types of "weird" artworks that art elitists claim to enjoy. I think he thinks that if he can just cut off all of the "escape avenues" for the mustached hipster -- "no, you're not allowed to talk about the history of this or that movement, or the artist's biography, or the dumb pseudo-philosophical artist's statement, you have to just look at the thing itself and tell me what it actually looks like" -- then the snob would be forced to admit defeat and admit that, yes, when you remove all possible external variables and immerse yourself in the pure visual experience (or aural experience or whatever), it actually is just a dumb ugly looking thing. At which point Scott could claim victory and his assertion that the snobs were never worth listening to in the first place would be vindicated.
His incredulity is on display, for example, when he discusses Benjamin's essay on Angelus Novus:
I've actually brought up this painting once or twice before on TheMotte in the context of other art discussions, always to the same perplexed reactions. I'm quite fond of this painting, and I couldn't just let Scott dis it like that, which is part of what compelled me to respond to this post in the first place.
Scott raises a number of interesting points and arguments throughout the post; I'd be happy to discuss any of them individually, but, I don't think that a point-by-point breakdown of the post would actually be persuasive in getting anyone on either side of the fence in this debate to change their minds. So for now I'll settle for the more modest goal of trying to dispel some of the incredulity. Yes, I am a real living breathing human who thinks that Angelus Novus is authentically beautiful. Not for any particularly "intellectual" or "contextual" reasons either. This is, as far as I can tell, simply my "natural" response to the painting (as "natural" as one can get anyway, seeing as one's "natural" response is always already impacted by one's life history, cultural upbringing, background philosophical assumptions, etc). Similarly, my "natural" response to the Chesterton poems that Scott loves so much is that they're, well, I have to break out the word he dreads here: kitschy. I'm not even saying that to be mean! Either to Scott or to Chesterton. I have no agenda here (or at least, whatever agenda I have, there's a pretty large chasm between it and the agenda of the modal blue-haired MFA student). I'm just calling it like I see it. (Full disclosure, I only sampled a small selection of Chesterton's poems, and I'm not much of a poetry fan in general to begin with.)
An honest dialogue should begin with the recognition that people can have idiosyncratic or even "elitist" tastes that aren't just based on bullshit political signalling. Scott would of course be the first to acknowledge that "taste is subjective", but I'm not sure if he really feels it in his bones. He's still looking for the angle, looking for something that would explain why all these ivory tower types have seemingly conspired to convince everyone that these obviously-ugly artworks are actually good, because surely no one could just simply believe that. Of course it would be utterly naive to suggest that politics and fashion play no role in "high art" trends. Of course they play a prominent role. But at the same time, they're not the only factor. It shouldn't be surprising that the types of people who dedicate their lives to becoming artists or art critics would also tend to converge on certain idiosyncratic aesthetic tastes, naturally and of their own accord, due to whatever shared underlying psychological factors drove them into art in the first place.
One of these "underlying psychological factors" might simply be the desire to grapple with the complexities of aesthetic experience as such, and a willingness to allow oneself to be transformed by that experience in radical ways. Scott treats "sensory pleasure" as essentially an unexamined, irreducible primitive, the bedrock of certainty that would be left over once one has abstracted away everything "extraneous": as though it were simply obvious to oneself when one finds an artwork to be "pleasant" or "beautiful" in the first place, as though it would be impossible or undesirable to call these modes of experience into question, to become unsure of and estranged from one's own perceptual experience. Tellingly, he does include "Ability To Profoundly Affect Or Transform You" as one of his markers of artistic quality, but suggests that it may be "emergent from some combination of sensory delight, novelty and point-making." But, the authentic work of art opens up the possibility of transforming what you experience as delightful in the first place, what you experience as a "valid point" in the first place. Conceptual groundwork of this nature calls for phenomenological experiences that are multilayered and complex rather than merely "pleasant"; it calls for engagement with the world and other people.
For understandable reasons, non-leftists get anxious whenever anyone brings up words like "historical" or "transformative" in relation to art and culture; any call to be mindful of "context", especially "political context", is seen as somewhat threatening. For decades in the West, these concepts have all been associated with the forceful imposition of leftist political strictures and leftist assaults on traditional (especially religious) culture. "You're asking me to 'be open to' being 'transformed' by art; so you're asking me to allow myself to be transformed by these people? The ones who run our universities and art galleries today? Really?" I'm not saying that your concerns are entirely unfounded. All I'm saying is that it doesn't have to be this way. Recognizing that art is ineluctably embedded in its social and political context is intrinsically neither left nor right; a more holistic way of appreciating art that goes beyond simplistic notions of "art for art's sake" can and should be reclaimed.
If you show a random group of teenage students that “Novus Angelus”, how could it possibly be good for them? I don’t see any rational path toward an argument that this would better their life or make them happy. The figure has an instinctively ugly face and form, and it’s evidently intended to humiliate the angels by depicting them as such. So it is the depiction of something normally glorious as pathetic. Okay. We can rationally see how it would make them worse: they are seeing an ugly and pathetic humanoid-like figure; they are being told it is “art”, which will confuse them; they are desacralizing something culturally important. If you wanted to increase unhappiness among humanity, you would show them this nonsense and say it is art, and they will infer, “hey, this is very important to look at”, so you’re biasing them to internalize filth, inhumanity, even evilness. Why?
Compare that antisocial filth to Tiepolo’s Annunciation. Even having almost no cultural understanding, you can see the good of the work. A student would see: a young woman reading is visited by an angel who points her to something mysterious and glorious above. If you show this to 100 students, all 100 of them would be benefitted. They would internalize a sense of something better, a sense of wonder and mystery, maybe a sense of the importance of reading. Or show a boy Salvatore Nobili’s Sant'Antonio in Campo Marzio and his life could change forever — he would be more courageous, more moral, more humble.
The purpose of art is not to make people very opinionated about art or to try to trick them like an intellectual gypsy. The point is to greaten us. We evolved the ability to make art to display our health and signal our competence. We evolved the ability to appreciate that art because we appreciate health. We evolved the ability to think with complexity because it sustained our common health and civic health over generations. The art instinct would have never developed in humanity if we had the degeneracy of the art snob. The art snob does not understand the point of anything, they are sick and their soul is cut off from the Realm of the Living.
If you are not capable of evaluating anything outside your totalizing culture war impulses, your art criticism will look like this, verbose and childish. Naive but not in an unpretentious and innocent way. The opposite.
You hate Angelus Novus because of what you assume about the painter and his intent, not because of any intrinsic ugliness or "degeneracy" in the work.
If you had been told that Klee was a devout Christian who spent his life trying to understand God and His angels and show them to others in a particular symbolic way, resulting in a very idiosyncratic, arguably "ugly" art style? Your opinion would flip like a bit. Maybe you still wouldn't particularly enjoy his work, but you'd appreciate his intent and wouldn't be railing about degenerate filth corrupting the youth.
Which ironically makes the point of a lot of art appreciators (a point Scott tries to negate, not very successfully) that art has context, and no matter how much you try to "appreciate it on its own merits" you and it are not in a vacuum and your priors and the context of the piece influence your perception of it.
I do not like modern Catholic art or music. It has been aesthetically barren since halfway through the 20th century, at least, and terminal before. (This is hardly due to bias, because some of my favorite composers are Orthodox John Tavener and Arvo Part, recently dead and living, and I’m not an Estonian or British Eastern Orthodox). Even the new “traditional”ish style is mediocre-to-okay, and my God, I have no words for the new stuff. Neither is this just me liking old stuff, because I do not like Eastern Orthodox iconography, generally speaking. Traditional European art moves you with powerful social emotions, with everything working together to heighten to effect, and pieces were selected according to the taste of patrons who didn’t need to flex pretention, having nothing whatsoever to prove, being the highest status and occasionally sovereign. Also, it focused on perfecting a handful of scenes for a maximum social-emotional response, ie the crucifixion must have been painted 200 times a year in every city, and gradually the visual language of the scene evolved to become perfect through a centuries-long selection process, involving artists selecting the best micro-motif over hundreds of years, the wisdom transferred in studios with an imitative learning structure. But we want to discard all that today, because we are very foolish.
It moves you.
Do you think it possible that people who are not you are moved by things that do not move you, and are not moved by things that move you?
I'm not saying "Everything is subjective" so no one can say anything is good or bad. But when you make absolute statements about not just the artistic, but the social and moral value of art, as if your judgment is clearly true and everyone else is either pretending or being deceived by the devil, well, it's beyond the arrogance of someone saying "I don't like modern art" or "Twilight is a crappy book." It's presuming that you can define good art (according to your particular fixations) and see through the pretense of anyone who likes things you don't like.
As I said, Angelus Novus doesn't move me. But clearly it moves some people. They aren't just degenerate angel-haters. Even I can see that while at first glance, sure, it looks like something I might put on the fridge because my kid drew it, ("Oh, it's an angel? Of course it is!") but further examination shows a level of intentionality, composition, color, and drafting that required artistry. Maybe not to my taste but there is meaning there. Even you evidently sense that since you so strongly react to its "degeneracy," which certainly could not be the case for some unskilled scribble.
People are moved by the placebo effect, authority bias, the desire to fit in, and ambient cues in the environment. Just as they were in 1924, four years after Novus Angelus, where this was proven:
…
https://time.com/archive/6656527/hoax/
I do not consider it art. I do think this is just rusing the tasteless and easily-influenced.
Perhaps some people really were moved by Yes, We Have No Bananas or "Jerdanowitsches's" other works. More likely it took in some critics who weren't really moved by it but were signaling, which is what Scott (and you) claim is all that people who say they like Klee's work are doing.
Certainly people can be hoaxed (Jordan-Smith isn't the first guy to put one over on a community of pretentious snobs). But people have in this thread have expressed why they find Angelus Novus worthwhile. You can disagree with their analysis, but all you've offered are personal expressions of disgust. There is a difference between "I don't like this" and "This is objectively bad and if you think it's good you're either lying or stupid." And as I said, bluntly, I don't believe your analysis is based on the art but on the artist.
One day I hope we find a TQ measurement similar to IQ. The low IQ do not realize why what they like to do is destructive. Similarly, I don’t think the low TQ realize why the art they like is destructive (to their own wellness and civilization). Until we have twin studies measuring the longterm impact of beholding works by different artists on wellbeing and prosocial behavior, we will just have to disagree.
If you just want to lob Dunning-Kruger Syndrome accusations at people who disagree with you, I could make up some Qs of my own, but again, it's not in any way a convincing argument.
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